Blogging and Authorship

Blogs are important to companies. Twenty-three percent of the total time spent online is devoted to social media and blogging. Not only can blogs add flavor, knowledge and a splash of fun to your site, but they also help it appear more in search results. It’s no wonder that 37 percent of marketers think blogging is the most valuable form of content marketing.

The importance of Google+ authorship

Google+ allows companies and individual writers an option to add what it calls “authorship” to a blog post. Authorship means that that photo and name appears next to the post in search results.

Claiming authorship on Google+ will likely help increase SEO rankings, making your company’s blog appear higher in Google searches. So, if you’re blogging for purposes of SEO, it will definitely work to your advantage to allow authorship on your blog.

The importance of multiple authors

When it comes to claiming authorship, allow each of your individual writers to claim their own posts with their individual Google+ profiles, rather than giving the brand authorship to everyone. This will allow for several authors, instead of only one (the brand). You can throw in a post published under your brand’s Google+ profile every once in a while, but the majority of the posts should point back to various employees.

Sixty-two percent of blog readers believe multiple authors make a blog more credible, so go ahead and give credit to multiple authors. It will make your company more reliable to many of your readers.

The other advantage of allowing authorship under individual employees, instead of publishing every single post under your brand’s Google+ account, is that it encourages them to share within their own Google+ circles. People tend to be proud of what they write and eager to share their work with friends and family. If one of your employee’s Google+ account is attached to a post that they wrote, they may feel compelled to share their published work with their own Google+ circles, giving you the potential to increase traffic.

So while adding authorship amps up your SEO potential, adding multiple authors increases your brand’s credibility and possibly even traffic. Together, these have the power to help your brand’s blog go viral.

Don’t miss next week’s post, where we’ll wrap up our three-part series with a foolproof plan for making sure your business is just the right amount of social on Google+.